The Catholic Counter-Reformation

Point 106. Economic democracy is antisocial

Political democracy, impious, absurd and ruinous as it is for nations, is even more catastrophic for the prosperity and stability of fundamental human communities. For families it is calamity and death.

1. The modern economy is an anti-ecology. This is primarily because it proclaims itself to be, and indeed is, fundamentally democratic. It knowingly tends to replace the real needs of individuals with illusory desires, the compelling necessities of their condition with their arbitrary and passing wishes, their certain duties with their self-styled rights, and finally their true good with the pleasures of the moment. Its major act of imprudence, erected into the supreme law of every economic democracy, is to transpose God’s beatitude to man, Heaven to earth, the future to the present, and the spiritual to the carnal. Christ’s Mystical Body, the fraternity of the sons of God, is transposed to the individual, a solitary, monopolising and jealous divinity.

2. This utopian claim to immediate material happiness for all provokes the dissolution of society due to the fact that each individual now acquires the supreme rule of turning everything to his own individual advantage, with no respect for anything, no fear of any sanction, nor love for anyone. He now acts in the stupid or savage cult of his immediate pleasure alone. It constitutes an absolute negation of the objective reality of the ecological life, which is the family and of the practical art of the family prudently pursuing a certain achievable prosperity common to all its members, whilst also showing respect for the well-being of other families.

3. Alas, through a distressing correspondence of views, contemporary Catholic economists have rallied to this system, establishing a Christian (!) democratic economy. They have kept the monumental error of the system, which is individualism. They, however, have thought to remedy it by calling it “ personalism” and by transfiguring it into the profound search – too profound! – for the person’s dignity, his well-being, and his spiritual and moral rights in this temporal life! Thus the whole economy should be in the service, not indeed of the individual – who, according to them, comes under society and is therefore subject to being exploited at will –, but of the person, the possessor of sacred, inviolable and imprescriptible rights, who is therefore superior to any common law.

No! Economic society is not for the person, nor for his salvation (theory of the years 1930-1960), nor for his liberation (theory of the years 1960-1980). The truth is that man, who receives everything from his family and who owes it everything, only finds his proper ecological finality in the common good of family prosperity. Any system, be it a religion, denying this fundamental truth will trigger the collapse of the society and of families. It is therefore a crime to deny it.